So I have tons and tons of things I've been meaning to write, however, it has all been on the back burner (and rightfully so) because of something MUCH more important.
I got married!!
I am now legally Christina Warren-Robertson, though I will remain Christina Warren professionally.
I couldn't be happier to spend my life with Grant, my soulmate, best friend and husband.
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This faux-ad for Prometheus from Fox is a work of pure brilliance. The entire campaign, which I give an overview of here is extremely well constructed and is an example of a studio and ad agency understanding the audience for a film.
Tremendous work. I'm beyond proud that Mashable was able to be the partner premiere partner for this clip and look forward to seeing the film on June 8.
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David Samuels has penned an incredible feature and profile about Kanye West for The Atlantic, perfectly titled “American Mozart.”
It's an amazing bit of culture writing serving not just as an extended review of the Watch The Throne tour and the diametric artistry employed by West and Jay-Z, but by also zeroing in on exactly what makes Kanye such a genius.
That Kanye West is a musical genius is not new; it's been accepted as fact since 2004's The College Dropout. Still, assertions of that genius almost always accompany caveats about his attitude and his public behavior. Yeah, Kanye's a genius – but he's also an asshole. Or as President Obama is quoted in the article, “He is a jackass. But he's talented.”
That caveat is absolutely well deserved but it too often acts to minimize that genius.
While Samuels acknowledges the personality issue – in fact, it's a core tenant in his article – he also fully recognizes the talent.
He writes:
As Kanye and Jay kick into gear on “Gotta Have It,” I finally recognize the James Brown sample that Kanye is using—a bare snippet of “My Thang.” It’s a sex song with sinewy-sweet, insistent rhythms and a knock-’em-dead vocal from the Godfather of Soul. The two-and-a-half-second sample that Kanye has woven into his new song is in a way a tribute to his own gift for economy. It shows that the same producer who can mix 11 different voices in the studio version of “All of the Lights” and clear the rights to half of “Try a Little Tenderness” at God knows what cost can also pinch a dollar when he needs to, and use a note of someone else’s voice as a single element in his own collage. It’s also a sign of how bleak this branch, at least, of black popular music has become since the days of James Brown, who embodied the sensual urgency of right now, baby—a far cry from the cold-eyed tales of drugs, ego, paranoia, and high-end luxury goods being retailed onstage. “Squeeze me, hold me, roll me, make me scream, make me feel, gimme my thang” was an urgent plea for sex, but the warmth of the music spoke of an even more elemental need for human connection. All that’s left now is a harder-edged version of the last phrase, in which the need for human connection has been canceled out. Whatever faults he may have as a person, Kanye is preternaturally self-aware. The sad, attenuated, one-note version of Brown’s lyric haunting the coked-out beat is the point of the song.
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My more measured op-ed after my InstaEmo fit this morning.
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Dammit.
Just…dammit.
These things always start out with the best intentions but unless you're Amazon and Zappos they never pan out the way you want.
To be clear – I'm totally happy for the Instagram team – they deserve the success they've found tenfold. I just wish it wasn't Facebook…because no matter how much you say,
It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’l be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience.
The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love. You’ll still have all the same people you follow and that follow you.You’ll still be able to share to other social networks. And you’ll still have all the other features that make the app so fun and unique.
We’re psyched to be joining Facebook and are excited to build a better Instagram for everyone.
The reality is different. It just is. The guise of the network becomes different. The guise of the mobile service changes. It shifts.
This isn't a slight at Facebook – I'd feel the same way if Twitter, Google or even Apple bought this company.
Maybe I'm being irrational – I'm sure I am. In the long run, this will enable more people to use Instagram, which is obviously great. And yet. And yet.
Update: $1 billion.
That's some serious money. Like, that's an offer you can't refuse. Good on them.
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With the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of Titanic, we're seeing renewed interest in re-publishing or re-telling the stories behind that famous ship. If you are going to read anything, read this excellent article in Sports Illustrated.
The whole story, which is about tennis as much as it is Titanic, is utterly fascinating, but this part really got me:
Dick and Charles Williams walked the deck. They tried to stay warm by riding stationary bikes in the exercise room. Finally, as the letters of the ship's name on the bow were about to slip underwater, they decided to abandon ship. They stood near the rail, an infirm man and his only child, and said their goodbyes. As they were speaking, one of the ship's enormous smokestacks came crashing down. Dick darted out of the way. Charles was crushed, instantly killed. At that point Dick jumped into the ocean. In 28º water, swathed in a raccoon coat, he began to swim for his life.
Seriously, Instapaper this shit.
Also, check out this video that James Cameron and National Geographic put together to show how the Titanic sank:
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Update: So we're now at 34,000 downloads and counting.
Some of the news today has been about a nasty trojan targeted at Mac users that has apparently infected 600,000 machines.
While most of these infestations probably occurred in September or October (when the trojan first hit), Apple didn't actually patch its version of Java until this week.
Surprisingly, the schadenfreude from the anti-Mac users has been less than I've seen in the past. The lack of “see, Macs aren't that secure” comments I'm seeing are kind of eerie, to be honest.
However, as a Mac enthusiast and a person who is often the most tech savvy person in her circle of friends, family and co-workers, I was faced with a dilemma: How to make it easy for people to check to see if their computers were safe, without having to force them to use Terminal.
For lots of people, Terminal is a scary place and users just don't want to go there. Thus, I whipped up two of the ugliest AppleScripts in all of existence to automate the process for my co-workers.
After seeing the feedback on that end, I decided to publish my work for the community at large.
Over 12,000 downloads later, I think I can call this a success.
If you (or a loved one) wants a way to check to see if they have the Flashback trojan but don't want to bother with Terminal…the scripts are located here.
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It's a few weeks behind schedule, but the first beta for the next major WordPress update is now out.
It might seem odd that I'm blogging about this now that I've effectively left WordPress (though as I said last night, I do plan on re-designing my site to act as a portfolio of sorts, and chances are I'll probably use WordPress for that task), but old habits die hard.
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I had an upset stomach earlier today so I skipped tonight's HTC/Sprint event. I'm only disappointed because this meant I couldn't grill the Sprint people on their LTE timetable.
Look, I'm glad Dan Hesse and his creepy commercials are finally getting religion and giving up on WiMax, the last thing we needed was another GSM/CDMA 3G debate…the 4G lingo is hard enough to decipher.
From Pete Pachal's post at Mashable
Sprint so far hasn’t deployed a high-speed LTE network, and it didn’t announce an official launch at this evening’s event. But the frequencies are settled, the chips are ready and the network will begin rollout later this year (first in Texas, Atlanta, and Baltimore). The Evo 4G LTE will be ready for that network when it arrives.
Still, I can't help but think pre-announcing a phone before you even tell us when you're rolling out the network is stupid.
I was at CES 2011 when Verizon announced their first LTE phone, the Motorola Droid Bionic…a phone that was supposed to be out by March, then April and then shipped in September. (which meant the first LTE device i got to test was some Samsung phone that had the Droid moniker but sucked)
Pre-announcing a phone that is at least four or five months away from release just to get some ink seems silly. That phone better ship with ICS.
For what it is worth – while I have no need for a 4G LTE handset (battery life isn't worth it), my 4G LTE iPad is the shit. It's faster than Cablevision in Brooklyn.
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TL;DR: I'm joining Svbtle. It will be my new home for my personal thoughts, rants and attempts to wax quixotic about the next big thing. The domain, which I've owned for nearly three years, is perfect for this project because this is just me.
On March 12, 2007, I officially became a professional writer.
After toiling in obscurity (I jest), my commentary about American Idol was published on a weekly basis in the print edition of USA Today and on the “Idol Chatter” blog. I got the job – alongside a panel of music-industry experts – because I was a prolific commenter on USA Today's music and Idol blogs. I was young, they wanted young, and I had opinions.
At that time in my life, getting a freelance gig at USA Today was a big deal. At 24, I was unsure of what I wanted to do with my life or what direction to take. Five years later, my life is completely different in almost every single way. The success that I have achieved over the last five years has outpaced my wildest expectations.
Actually, that's not true.
I didn't have any expectations about a professional online writing career – if only because I wouldn't allow myself to have them. I couldn't even think about the possibility that my writing and my skill with words would lead me into a new career. That the people I looked up to and obsessively followed would some day be at the same parties that I'm at. Or that I would converse with my heroes at CES, Macworld or NAB as peers.
The life that I have now – which includes my upcoming marriage to my soul mate Grant Robertson – was a fantasy that 24-year old Christina wouldn't allow herself to even indulge in.
Amazingly, thanks to technology, I have records of my too-scared-to-dream past. In April 2001, I started a LiveJournal and I wrote in it regularly until 2007. Though not indexed by search engines, that journal is easily discoverable by anyone who thinks hard enough; some entries friends-only or protected, most just out in the open. If you want to relive my freshmen year of college, feel free. I'm actually secure enough with myself not to care.
From LiveJournal (which was actually a replacement for hand-coded HTML via a GeoCities account), I migrated to WordPress. I started using that to power my personal website (especially after I was able to secure christinawarren.com from some bitch who forgot to renew her domain name) and for a few years, was fairly active with it.
I freelanced and made next-to-nothing for a few years – working my way up through the system, slowly but surely becoming “that girl who writes about Macs and Apple and knows a lot about movies.” In 2009, my fortunes changed. Not only did I start a nice freelancing gig with AMC Entertainment (the movie theater chain), Mashable approached me and asked me to write for them full-time.
The last two and a half years have been a true blur – from riding the wave of Mashable's surreal success, to moving to New York City, to getting the opportunity to build out my own vision for what the intersection of entertainment and technology can look like.
Over the last two and a half years, my central focus has been on my work and to that end, my personal publishing space has languished. There just isn't enough time in the day.
More than that, the format just felt inappropriate. The problem with being an early adopter and a technology journalist is actually getting time to use any of the services you cover or write about. I have a Tumblr, which I quite enjoy, but my reach there is considerably less than if I use Facebook. Google+ or even my poor, neglected website.
Moreover, because of the way I write – which is to use TextMate and a customized MultiMarkdown bundle that the genius Brett Terpstra built for me – using any CMS is always an annoyance.
Plus, with WordPress – and to a lesser degree Tumblr – I have to worry about things like aesthetics. How will it look. How will it perform.
All of those decisions – where to publish, what app to use to craft a post, how to design or redesign the page – end up preventing me from getting anything up at all.
That's why reading Dustin's opus about the creation of Svbtle resonated so strongly with me. To the point that I actually started watching the open source knockoff on GitHub.
I'm still going to redesign my main website – the plan is to make it more of a way to showcase my work and various media appearances. For everything else, I'll be here.
My hope is that the simplicity, the Markdown compatibility and the blank aesthetic will help me realize my goal of putting more content out under my own name, without having to be about work.
I missed the fifth anniversary of my professional writing career – in large part because I was unhappy with my publishing options. I'll be damned if I miss the next big life milestone for the same reason.
Perhaps the most freeing aspect of this process is that for the first time in just over five years, I'm ready to have a place to just write for myself.
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